The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick

The first of Peter Handke’s novels to be published  in English, The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick is a true modern classic that “portrays the…breakdown of a murderer in ways that recall Camus’s The Stranger”  (Richard Locke, The New York Times). The self-destruction of a soccer goalie turned construction worker who wanders aimlessly around a stifling Austrian border town after pursuing and then murdering, almost unthinkingly, a female movie cashier is mirrored by his use of direct, sometimes fractured prose that conveys “at its best a seamless blend of lyricism and horror seen in the runes of a disintegrating world” (Bill Marx, Boston Sunday Globe).